QEMU is a hosted virtual machine monitor: It emulates CPUs through dynamic binary translation and provides a set of device models, enabling it to run a variety of unmodified guest operating systems. It also can be used together with KVM in order to run virtual machines at near-native speed (requiring hardware virtualization extensions on x86 machines). QEMU can also be used purely for CPU emulation for user-level processes, allowing applications compiled for one architecture to be run on another.

In this mode QEMU runs single Linux or Darwin/Mac OS X programs that were compiled for a different instruction set. System calls are thunked for endianness and for 32/64 bit mismatches. Fast cross-compilation and cross-debugging are the main targets for user-mode emulation.

The QEMU website[7] provides a complete list of supported architectures.

The virtual machine can interface with many types of physical host hardware. These include: hard disks, CD-ROM drives, network cards, audio interfaces, and USB devices. USB devices can be completely emulated (mass storage from image files, input devices), or the host's USB devices can be used (however, this requires administrator privileges and does not work with all devices).

Virtual disk images can be stored in a special format (qcow or qcow2) that only take up disk space that the guest OS actually uses. This way, an emulated 120 GB disk may occupy only a few hundred megabytes on the host. The QCOW2 format also allows the creation of overlay images that record the difference from another (unmodified) base image file. This provides the possibility for reverting the emulated disk's contents to an earlier state. For example, a base image could hold a fresh install of an operating system that is known to work, and the overlay images are used. Should the guest system become unusable (through virus attack, accidental system destruction, ...), the user can delete the overlay and reconstruct an earlier emulated disk-image version.

QEMU can emulate network cards (of different models) which share the host system's connectivity by doing network address translation, effectively allowing the guest to use the same network as the host. The virtual network cards can also connect to network cards of other instances of QEMU or to local TAP interfaces. Network connectivity can also be achieved by bridging a TUN/TAP interface used by QEMU with a non-virtual Ethernet interface on the host OS using the host OS's bridging features.

QEMU integrates several services to allow the host and guest systems to communicate; for example, an integrated SMB server and network-port redirection (to allow incoming connections to the virtual machine). It can also boot Linux kernels without a bootloader.

QEMU does not depend on the presence of graphical output methods on the host system. Instead, it can allow one to access the screen of the guest OS via an integrated VNC server. It can also use an emulated serial line, without any screen, with applicable operating systems.

The Tiny Code Generator (TCG) aims to remove the shortcoming of relying on a particular version of GCC or any compiler, instead incorporating the compiler (code generator) into other tasks performed by QEMU at run time. The whole translation task thus consists of two parts: blocks of target code (TBs) being rewritten in TCG ops - a kind of machine-independent intermediate notation, and subsequently this notation being compiled for the host's architecture by TCG. Optional optimisation passes are performed between them.

TCG requires dedicated code written to support every architecture it runs on. It also requires that the target instruction translation be rewritten to take advantage of TCG ops, instead of the previously used dyngen ops.

Starting with QEMU Version 0.10.0, TCG ships with the QEMU stable release.[8]

KQEMU was a Linux kernelmodule, also written by Fabrice Bellard, which notably sped up emulation of x86 or x86-64 guests on platforms with the same CPU architecture. This worked by running user mode code (and optionally some kernel code) directly on the host computer's CPU, and by using processor and peripheral emulation only for kernel-mode and real-mode code. KQEMU could execute code from many guest OSes even if the host CPU did not support hardware-assisted virtualization. KQEMU was initially a closed-source product available free of charge, but starting from version 1.3.0pre10,[9] it was relicensed under the GNU General Public License. QEMU versions starting with 0.12.0 (as of August 2009[update]) support large memory which makes them incompatible with KQEMU.[10] Newer releases of QEMU have completely removed support for KQEMU.

QVM86 was a GNU GPLv2 licensed drop-in replacement for the then closed-source KQEMU. The developers of QVM86 ceased development in January, 2007.

Intel's Hardware Accelerated Execution Manager (HAXM) is a cost-free (but not open-source) alternative to KVM for x86-based hardware-assisted virtualization on Windows and Mac OS X. As of 2013[update] Intel mostly solicits its use with QEMU for Android development.[11]

The MIPS-compatible Loongson-3 processor adds 200 new instructions to help QEMU translate x86 instructions; those new instructions lower the overhead of executing x86/CISC-style instructions in the MIPS pipeline. With additional improvements in QEMU by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Loongson-3 achieves an average of 70% the performance of executing native binaries while running x86 binaries from nine benchmarks.[14]

Virtualization solutions that use QEMU are able to execute multiple virtual CPUs in parallel. QEMU is also able to run multiple threads in user-mode emulation mode.

For full system emulation, QEMU uses a single thread to emulate all the virtual CPUs and hardware. COREMU[15] is a patch to QEMU to eliminate this limitation. Each core uses a separate instance of QEMU binary translation engine, with a thin library layer to handle the inter-core and device communication and synchronization.

VirtualBox, released in January 2007, uses some of QEMU's virtual hardware devices, and has a built-in dynamic recompiler based on QEMU. As with KQEMU, VirtualBox runs nearly all guest code natively on the host via the VMM (Virtual Machine Manager) and uses the recompiler only as a fallback mechanism, e.g., when guest code executes in real mode.[16] In addition, VirtualBox does a lot of code analysis and patching using a built-in disassembler in order to minimize recompilation. VirtualBox is free and open-source (available under GPL), except for certain features.

Xen, a virtual machine monitor, can run in HVM (hardware virtual machine) mode, using Intel VT-x or AMD-V hardware x86 virtualization extensions and ARMCortex-A7 and Cortex-A15 virtualization extension.[17] This means that instead of paravirtualized devices, a real set of virtual hardware is exposed to the domU to use real device drivers to talk to.

QEMU includes several components: CPU emulators, emulated devices, generic devices, machine descriptions, user interface, and a debugger. The emulated devices and generic devices in QEMU make up its device models for I/O virtualization.[18] They comprise a PIIX3 IDE (with some rudimentary PIIX4 capabilities), Cirrus Logic or plain VGA emulated video, RTL8139 or E1000 network emulation, and ACPI support.[19] APIC support is provided by Xen.

Xen-HVM has device emulation based on the QEMU project to provide I/O virtualization to the VMs. Hardware is emulated via a QEMU "device model" daemon running as a backend in dom0. Unlike other QEMU running modes (dynamic translation or KVM), virtual CPUs are completely managed to the hypervisor, which takes care of stopping them while QEMU is emulating memory-mapped I/O accesses.

KVM (Kernel Virtual Machine) is a FreeBSD and Linux kernel module that allows a user space program access to the hardware virtualization features of various processors, with which QEMU is able to offer virtualization for x86, PowerPC, and S/390 guests. When the target architecture is the same as the host architecture, QEMU can make use of KVM particular features, such as acceleration.

In early 2005, Win4Lin introduced Win4Lin Pro Desktop, based on a 'tuned' version of QEMU and KQEMU and it hosts NT-versions of Windows. In June 2006,[20] Win4Lin released Win4Lin Virtual Desktop Server based on the same code base. Win4Lin Virtual Desktop Server serves Microsoft Windows sessions to thin clients from a Linux server.

In September 2006, Win4Lin announced a change of the company name to Virtual Bridges with the release of Win4BSD Pro Desktop, a port of the product to FreeBSD and PC-BSD. Solaris support followed in May 2007 with the release of Win4Solaris Pro Desktop and Win4Solaris Virtual Desktop Server.[21]

SerialICE is a QEMU-based firmware debugging tool running system firmware inside of QEMU while accessing real hardware through a serial connection to a host system. This can be used as a cheap replacement for hardware ICEs.[22]

As of 2014[update], QEMU does not support 3D acceleration (work-in-progress [23]).

For unaccelerated full system emulation, QEMU cannot utilize multiple host CPUs but runs all the virtual CPUs from a single thread. Virtual CPUs will use multiple threads (and thus can run concurrently) when using KVM for acceleration.

QEMU emulates the ARMv7instruction set (and down to ARMv5TEJ) with NEON extension.[26] It emulates full systems like Integrator/CP board, Versatile baseboard, RealView Emulation baseboard, XScale-based PDAs, Palm Tungsten|E PDA, Nokia N800 and Nokia N810 Internet tablets etc. QEMU also powers the Android emulator which is part of the Android SDK (most current Android implementations are ARM based). Under development is iEmu, emulator of Apple's iPhone. Starting from version 2.0.0 of their Bada SDK, Samsung has also chosen QEMU to help development on emulated 'Wave' devices.

In 1.5.0 and 1.6.0 Samsung Exynos 4210 (dual-core Cortex a9) and Versatile Express ARM Cortex-A9ARM Cortex-A15 are emulated. In 1.6.0, the 32-bit instructions of the ARMv8 (AARCH64) architecture are emulated, but 64-bit instructions are unsupported.

The Xilinx Cortex A9-based Zynq SoC is modelled, with the following elements: